Tag: Paul Wegener

Two films by Henrik Galeen: Der Student von Prag (1926) and Alraune (1928)

This week, I reflect on two films by Henrik Galeen that have been released on a wonderful 2-disc DVD set by Edition Filmmuseum in Germany. I have been awaiting this set since it was announced nearly two years ago, so keenly pounced on it at the first opportunity. This pairing also makes a nice sequel to my last post on horror films inspired by German silent films – and Galeen’s script for Nosferatu (1922) in particular. So, in chronological order, let us begin…

Der Student von Prag (1926; Ger.; Henrik Galeen). Galeen’s film is a remake of the 1913 film, written and co-directed by Hanns Heinz Ewers and starring Paul Wegener as the titular student. I wrote about that version some time ago, and I was very curious to see how Galeen’s version differed from the original. The plot is essentially the same. The student Balduin (Conrad Veidt) is convinced by the devilish Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) to sell his reflection for enough gold and status to seduce the aristocrat Margit von Schwarzenberg (Agnes Esterhazy). Balduin attains wealth and success, much to the jealousy of the besotted flower girl Lyduschka (Elizza La Porta) and Margit’s fiancé Baron von Waldis (Ferdinand von Alten). Balduin’s success is dogged by his doppelganger, who fights and kills von Waldis in a duel and ruins his reputation. It all goes downhill from there, as the film’s opening shot of Balduin’s gravestone promised…

I’m afraid I found the first one hundred minutes of this film a slog to sit through. While the photography is exquisite, especially the gorgeous exterior landscapes, the drama moves exceedingly slowly. The lean, concise psychological drama of 1913 has become a rather baggy melodrama. The character of Lyduschka becomes a rather more sycophantic presence (but not a more sympathetic one), while the scenes between Balduin and Margit are more lengthily (but no more convincingly) elaborated. Furthermore, Galeen restages many of the same moments of the 1913 version: the meeting of Balduin and Scapinelli at the inn; the confrontation with his mirror image; the meeting at the Jewish cemetery; the duel fought by Balduin’s double. While the in-camera double exposures are as excellent as the 1913 version, none of them are as well staged or as dramatically effective. As I wrote in my piece on the earlier film, the long takes of the 1913 version give all the trickery an extraordinarily uncanny quality: the unreal seems to emerge directly from within the real. There is nothing as effective in the 1926 version.

What bothered me especially was the tone of Werner Krauss’s performance as Scapinelli. He seemed to be almost parodying his performance in Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919). In Der Student von Prag, he out-hams anything Emil Jannings ever did. His eyes bulge, he puffs out his cheeks, he gurns and grimaces. It’s faintly creepy, but it’s so outrageously different from any other performance within the film that it’s simply not frightening. Even his beard looks exceedingly artificial, almost like it’s been painted on. Indeed, Krauss’s whole demeanour is extrovertly artificial. Why? He’s either been told by Galeen to clown about like this, or else Galeen has utterly failed to rein him in. Everyone else in Der Student von Prag performs their roles with a degree of dramatic realism. It’s a fantastical story, but the performances are realistic. All except Krauss. Fine, Scapinelli is a faintly otherworldly figure, but I can’t believe that his clownish appearance and mannerisms are the best choice to signify this. (Again, the performances are far more consistent in the cast of the 1913 version.)

Exacerbating this factor is Galeen’s editing. So oddly were some scenes put together that I wondered if I was watching a print reconstructed from different negatives (i.e. a blend of “home” and “export” versions). When Scapinelli first propositions Balduin at the inn, Galeen cuts between a front-on mid shot of the two men to a shot that is captured from a side-on angle (in fact, more than 90 degrees from the front-on shot). It’s a peculiar choice, and the cutting between oddly different angles here and elsewhere in the film is very striking. (It’s also something I observed in Alraune, per my comments below.) This isn’t an issue of continuity: I don’t care how a film is put together, so long as it is effective. It’s because Galeen’s editing often lessens the tension in a scene, even the tension created within a particular shot, by cutting to a mismatched alternate angle or distance. Why, Henrik, why? The film is full of brilliant images, but I’m simply not sure Galeen can quite mobilize them into a truly convincing sequence of images.

All of that said, the last half hour of Der Student von Prag is a knockout. Balduin, having lost everything, proceeds to a drinking den where he drinks, dances, and revels. The band wears weird clown make-up and grotesque masks and blindfolds, and the double-bass is being played with a saw. Clearly, something odd has the potential to break out, and break out it does. Balduin starts to become more and more manic, and the sequence around him likewise grows more and more manic. Handheld camerawork turns the crowded, shadowy interior into a stomach-churning blur. But Balduin hasn’t had enough by far. He starts conducting the dancers with a riding whip; then he starts smashing crockery, then fittings, then furniture… The sequence lasts nearly ten minutes, and it just keeps going. I’m not sure (per my above comments) that Galeen really puts the shots together in a way that builds a convincing montage, but the sheer length of the sequence has its own manic sense of energy: it just keeps going, its obsessive cheer becoming less and less amusing and more and more unsettling. Veidt’s performance, too, grows subtly more manic. His face has moved from resignation and grief to a kind of enforced, frenzied joy.

There follows a series of scenes in which Balduin races through the night, encountering Margit and then his doppelganger. What really makes the sequence work is the way the wind haunts both interior and exterior spaces: whipping the trees, the curtains, the clothing… It gives a marvellously unsettling, threatening sense to every scene. This is where everything in the film works. Scapinelli (thankfully) is simply forgotten from the narrative and Balduin is left alone to face the consequences of his actions. Galeen abandons location shooting in favour of studios, which gives all these final “exteriors” the aura of nightmarish interiors, half-empty spaces filled with shadows and shards of buildings. Everything is sinister, malevolent – and empty of everything but Balduin and his sinister double. The final scene before the mirror is fantastic, filled with striking images of the shattered glass, and Veidt’s performance is superbly convincing: mad, violent, and tender all at once.

This is a fine way to end the film, but my word the rest was a slog to sit through. Even though the 1913 version consists for the most part of long, unbroken takes for each scene, it manages to tell the entire story succinctly and swiftly in barely 80 minutes. The 1926 version (in this restoration) is over 130 minutes. That’s fifty extra minutes to tell the same story. As good as the finale is, I think that the 1913 version is a far superior film. (So too is the version directed by Arthur Robison in 1935, starring Anton Walbrook as the eponymous student.)

Alraune (1928; Ger.; Henrik Galeen). Having re-adapted Ewers’s Der Student von Prag, a year later Galeen embarked on another adaptation of this author’s work. Ewers’s novel Alraune (1911) was a huge hit and republished many times in the early twentieth century. It still retains something of a cultish reputation among certain circles. In the anglophone world, there are two English translations available. One was issued in the 1920s and presents a rather prudishly reduced/edited text. The other is a recent, self-published edition, that offers a “complete, uncensored” text – but alas sacrifices fluency in English for the sake of adherence to the original. (My references below to Ewers’s text are therefore sourced from the original German edition.)

Ewers’s novel remains an impressively nasty piece of work. The story concerns Jakob ten Brinken, a scientist who inseminates a prostitute with the seed of a hanged murderer in order to study the offspring. “Alraune” is a female mandrake, a horrific vision of modern womanhood: she drives men to their deaths with violent desire, until she discovers her true origins and kills herself.

The author of this spectacular tale was a renowned provocateur. In a career spanning literature, philosophy, propaganda, acting, filmmaking, and occultism, Ewers was also sexually and politically radical.  Homosexual, he was twice married; a supporter of Jewish enfranchisement, he embraced National Socialism. (Inevitably, his views and lifestyle led to a fall from grace under the Nazis.) Ewers’s literary avatar was Frank Braun, who appears in Alraune as a hotblooded student, arrogant and ironic, who urges his uncle to test the bounds of human power – and to challenge God. Braun had already appeared in Ewers’s novel Der Zauberlehrling (1909), in which he infiltrates and subverts a religious cult, and would reappear in Vampir (1921), which explores his moral and literal transformation into a vampire.

The male narrator of Alraune is an obtrusive, prurient presence in the text, lingering over his imagined muse as he writes. This muse morphs from a “blond little sister” into a “wild, sinful sister of my hot nights”, her “wild soul stretches forth, glad of all shame, full of all poison” (7). (And so on, and so on.) Returning perpetually to this fantasy, the narrator himself becomes vampiric, metaphorically drinking “the blood that flowed from your wounds at night, which I mixed with my red blood, this blood that was infected by the sinful poisons of the hot desert” (174). The violence of this fantasy grows across the book, fixating with gruesome glee upon the imagined sister’s body – “eternal sin” bidding him tear into “the sweet little child’s breasts, which had become the gigantic breasts of a murderous whore” (333). This imagery characterizes the book’s peculiarly salacious tone. (There are, by my count, no less than thirty references to women’s breasts – not to mention numerous depictions of physical and mental torture to animals and humans.) Just as the narrator desires the sister he imagines, so the scientist within the narrative succumbs to his desire for the mandrake he creates – and, as ten Brinken’s nephew, Braun’s desire for Alraune crosses from the familial to the sexual. But Alraune is also a satirical novel, the first half of which is a profoundly critical overview of bourgeois conservatism at the turn of the century. In a world of institutionalized hypocrisy, corruption, and vice, both Frank Braun and the narrator are perverse Nietzscheans, willing to overturn every norm.

For the film version of Alraune, Galeen wrote his own screenplay, retaining only the barebones of Ewers’s novel (the first half of which does not even feature the figure of Alraune). Professor ten Brinken (Paul Wegener) has created animal life artificially and plans to do the same with a human subject. Harvesting the seed of a hanged criminal (Georg John) to inseminate a prostitute (Mia Pankau), he raises the offspring as his daughter Alraune. Seventeen years later, Alraune (Brigitte Helm) runs away from her boarding school with Wölfchen (Wolfgang Zilzer). En route, she meets the magician Torelli (Louis Ralph) and joins his circus. Ten Brinken tracks her down and forces her to accompany him to southern Europe. Here, Alraune’s flirtation with a viscount (John Loder) makes ten Brinken jealous. Discovering her origins, Alraune sets out to destroy her “father” by feigning a seduction and then ruining him at a casino. She also enlists the help of ten Brinken’s nephew Frank Braun (Iván Petrovich), with whom she eventually elopes. Financially and morally exhausted, ten Briken collapses and dies.

Alraune was premiered in Berlin in February 1928 in a version that measured some 3340m; projected at 20fps, this amounted to over 145 minutes of screen time. When the film was distributed outside Germany, numerous changes began to reshape the film. In the UK, the film was released as A Daughter of Destiny and cut from 3340m to 2468m. Critics blamed the cuts and retitling for the disruptive sense of continuity of this version. (This did not stop it being a big hit.) In France, where the film was released as Mandragore in February 1929, censorship was likewise blamed for producing narrative unevenness. In Russia, Alraune was released only after Soviet censors removed all supernatural aspects of the storyline. (The copy of this version preserved in Gosfilmofond is 2560m.) Most severe of all was the board of censors in the Netherlands, where the film was banned outright from exhibition in January 1930.

This history is important to remember when examining the film on this new DVD edition. No copy of the original German version of Alraune survives. The restoration completed in 2021 by the Filmmuseum München relies on two foreign copies (from Denmark and Russia), using archival documents to restore the correct scene order and (where possible) the original intertitles. What it cannot restore is the original montage, from which 300m of material remains missing. Until 2021, the only copy readily available was an abridged version derived from a Danish print, to which a previous restoration inserted new titles translated into German. As well as missing and reordered scenes, the titles of this Danish version are both more numerous and more moralistic in tone than the German original (as restored in 2021). While the 2021 restoration offers a version of the film that is closer to the original, I am left wondering about how coherent the original actually was. As I wrote with the case of Gösta Berlings saga (1924), new restorations cannot help films with inherently confusing or incoherent narratives. You can make them resemble original texts as much as you like, but that won’t help if the original is itself uneven.

Seen in the beautifully tinted copy presented on the new DVD, Alraune is a splendidly mounted and photographed film. Galeen creates a pleasingly rich, louche world, complete with telling expressionist touches (especially ten Brinken’s home/laboratory). But some of the issues I had with the tone and editing of Galeen’s Der Student von Prag are also evident in Alraune. The cutting is sometimes rather odd, as though the montage has been reassembled from fragments. I am uncertain whether this is the fault of Galeen or of the pitfalls of lost/jumbled material inherent to the prints used for the new restoration.

For example, late in the film, when ten Brinken is alone in the hotel room (Alraune is meanwhile meeting Frank Braun) the film keeps cutting back and forth between close-up and medium-close-up shots of ten Brinken. At this point, the Danish print inserts the vision of Alraune transforming into the mandrake root seen at the start of the film. In the German version (as restored in 2021), the vision of the mandrake is moved to an entirely different scene at the end of the film – but the editing of the shots of ten Brinken becomes no more coherent. What kind of effect is being sought by the back-and-forth shots of ten Brinken? Is the slight change in shot scale meant to convey doubt, hesitancy? What kind of reaction are we meant to have? What is the significance of this choice (if, indeed, it is a choice, rather than a textual anomaly)? Why break up Wegener’s performance into oddly mismatched chunks? I can perfectly well understand why the Danish editors of 1928 choose to interpolate the vision of the mandrake here: they wished to make sense of this otherwise inexplicable sequence of cuts, to suggest what it is that ten Brinken is thinking. As restored in 2021, Galeen’s montage is such an odd, indecisive, unconvincing way of putting together the scene. Again I ask: why, Henrik, why?

If the editing is sometimes odd and might be blamed on the complex textual history of the film, other aspects are surely to do with narrative and narrational problems. Some of the most basic elements of the narrative are left weirdly open. Though the film abandons the fatalistic conclusion of Ewers’s novel, the happy ending of Alraune running away with Frank Braun is entirely unsatisfactory. I understand how and why Alraune wishes to leave ten Brinken – the film makes it clear that she finds his lies and manipulation abhorrent. But why does she elope with Frank? The film sidesteps Frank Braun’s complicitly in inspiring and realizing ten Brinken’s experiment to create Alraune in the opening scenes, just as it offers no clarity on how or why Alraune decides to contact him – nor on how and when she develops feelings for him.

Again, a comparison between the 2021 restoration and the earlier Danish copy is instructive. In the only scene of Alraune/Frank together, the Danish version inserts additional intertitles to try and clarify the narrative. In this version of the scene, Frank begins (in good expositional fashion) by saying that Alraune has summoned him via letter. Alraune then replies at length: “In read in my ‘father’s’ diary all that happened before my birth. Have pity on me… I am eager to know everything.” In the German version, Frank says nothing at all, while Alraune merely says “Thank you for coming.” The inserted text in the Danish version is a clunky attempt to clarify the narrative, which in the German original is almost inexplicable. How did Alraune even come to know of Frank’s life (or even existence), given that Frank has been travelling for the past seventeen(?) years? And why does she suddenly send him a letter to come to meet her in southern Europe? And where/when exactly did she write to him, or know where to write? Given the supposed romantic relationship that develops between the characters (again, hardly seen in the film), these are perfectly reasonable questions to ask.

The film also remains ambiguous about the reality of (and thus our potential attitude towards) ten Brinken’s tenebrous theory of heredity. In the final scene (as restored in 2021), ten Brinken suffers delusions in his last stages of mental and physical collapse. He finds and rips from the ground a piece of vegetation he thinks is another mandrake root. As he gazes at it this perfectly ordinary root, we see a vision of the mandrake from his old collection transforming into the person of Alraune. This is clearly a fantasy, totally at odds with what we have just seen on screen. Yet the final shot of Alraune shows the ordinary root clutched by the dead ten Brinken transforming into the mythical mandrake. After showing us the scientist’s deluded folly, the film suddenly tempts us with a final trick. Do we believe? Was Alraune really a spirit of malign femininity, or just an ordinary young woman? What does the film think, or ask us to think?

I seems to me that the film invites us to ask these narrative or cultural questions not by choice (I don’t think it makes an effort even to frame such questions) but by the nature of its loose coherence and narrative gaps. (The Danish version simply cuts this entire final sequence, as if the editors had no hope of making it coherent.) As I hope I have articulated here and in my comments on Der Student von Prag, I am unconvinced that Galeen quite has a coherent thesis to suggest, proffer, or invite examination thereof.

None of these issues should detract from the greatest feature of Alraune: Brigitte Helm. I never cease to be amazed, delighted, and enthralled by this astonishing performer. And despite the emphasis in popular and scholarly writing on Alraune being a horror film, I cannot help but feel that Helm plays this film as a sinister comedy of manners. Though her character grows enraged at her “father” and in one sequence approaches him with half a mind to attack him (her attempt ultimately stalls before being enacted), for the most part she is a half-detached, half-curious figure who outwits and (in all senses) outperforms her male peers. As Alraune encounters (and seduces) a series of men, we see amusement spread over her face as the men grow jealous and fight or become sullen and despair. Only with ten Brinken does she deliberately set out to destroy a man (and for good reason), but always she recognizes masculine weaknesses. Alraune has an uncanny ability to adapt and survive, to make intelligent decisions that triumph over male desires and instincts.

In one of the climactic scenes, Alraune pretends to seduce ten Brinken. She does so to unnerve him, to prove her superiority and his weakness, and thus (in the film’s slightly hazy dramatic logic) to make him liable to ruin himself on the gambling table. In the scene in their hotel suite, Alraune walks from ten Brinken to a chaise longue, where she bends provocatively over the cushioned expanse of silk. While Alraune’s forward posture emphasizes her cleavage, her face is all innocence: eyes wide, brows raised, then a flutter of her lashes. Here, as in her every interaction with men on screen, Helm’s performance is defined by playfulness. One marvels not only at the transparency of her every gesture, but also at the way such readability invites collusion with the viewer. This is a performance designed to make us enjoy the pleasure of her seduction, to enjoy watching feminine cunning triumph over masculine vanity. The controlling, stern, selfish ten Brinken – with his enormous physical bulk – is here slow, stumbling, hesitant. Laid resplendently on the chaise longue, Alraune motions him over to offer her a cigarette, then gently nudges his leg when he hesitates at her side. Languorously taking the cigarette, she raises herself to receive the light – only to lower herself slowly as it is offered. Drawing him down towards her, she smokes, pouts, and spreads her body invitingly. As ten Brinken struggles to control his desire and confusion, Alraune finally bursts into laughter. Through Helm’s extraordinary control of movement, gesture, and expression, this whole sequence teeters deliciously on the border of self-parody. Her climactic laugh is both a release of tension and an acknowledgement that such performative vamping – femininity itself – is always a game. If Alraune is dramatically uneven, it is given emotional direction by Helm; whatever the plot, we can follow her performance.

In summary, after watching these two new restorations of his work, I remained unconvinced that Galeen was a great director. I love many qualities in these films, and each is (in its own way) very memorable. But they are also overlong and dramatically/tonally inconsistent. I am open to the possibility that some of their problems (editing/montage) derive from textual confusion and restorative lacunae, but others (performance style, narrational clarity) seem to me the result of artistic choices. Veidt and Helm (and Wegener) are superb in their respective roles, and Helm in particular is reason enough to treasure much of Alraune. But I admit that I prefer other adaptations of these same stories. I have already stressed my preference for the 1913 version of Der Student von Prag, and I here add that I prefer Richard Oswald’s version of Alraune from 1930 – also starring Helm. The latter version is also somewhat ragged, but its raggedness lets in a degree of dreamlike atmosphere that Galeen’s lacks. Oswald’s film is weirder, nastier, more extreme. Ten Brinken is more monstrous, Alraune more frenzied – and more vulnerable. (For those wishing to hear more on both films, I advise eager readers to consult my own forthcoming book on Brigitte Helm. It may be a while before it reaches print, but I hope it will be worth the wait…)

Finally, I must praise the Edition Filmmuseum DVDs of the two Galeen films. As ever from this label, the films are impeccably presented and the accompanying liner notes (and bonus pdf book) are highly valuable. But could we please have the 1930 version of Alraune released on disc? And the 1935 version of Der Student von Prag too?

Yours optimistically,

Paul Cuff

References

Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune, die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens (Munich: G. Müller, 1911).

Der Student von Prag (1913; Ger.; Hanns Heinz Ewers)

Once more I find myself literarily immersed in E.T.A. Hoffmann, and when it came to a select a silent film for this week the most thematically relevant seemed to be…

Der Student von Prag (1913; Ger.; Hanns Heinz Ewers)

Hard-up student and swordsman Balduin agrees to receive a fortune from the sinister Scapinelli, who takes as his price the reflection of Balduin. Enriched, Balduin pursues the Countess Margit, but he is shadowed both by the besotted Lyduschka, and by his own doppelganger…

The film has a theatrical set of introductions to the main players: they appear in front of sets of curtains, their names displayed on large painted panels that bar us from them. This is not unusual for a feature film of 1913, when the cinema was foregrounding its cultural respectability and boasting of its artistic abilities. After all, the author, Ewers, was a well-known author and Wegener a well-known stage star. But the film immediately takes us by surprise with the final credit: here are the lead actor, Paul Wegener, and the film’s writer-director, Hanns Heinz Ewers, discussing the film on location in Prague. Wegener is smoking a cigarette, pointing with his stick. But it is the author who looks most showy: wearing a huge broadbrimmed hat and smoking a pipe, he seems to flirt both with Wegener and with us. And in the background, resting in a tinted haze, is the city of Prague. If the theatrical trappings of the first credits promised a studio-bound literary adaptation, the film immediately corrects our expectations with this real exterior space.

Akt 1. Get used to this: a single shot, carefully arranged and composed in depth, that only occasionally pans right or left to follow a particular action. Otherwise, everything that happens does so within this restricted circumstance. The only cuts to will be to intertitles or information in the form of documents. (Thus far, so Bordwell.) But what is the effect of this style on this particular story, this particular setting? For a start, the uncanny enters in plain sight. The opening scene/shot shows the students gathered in the background among the tables and chairs of a café. In the foreground, a single table and two chairs. Balduin refuses to join in the revelry or admire the dancing of Lyduschka. He sits on one chair. Who will occupy the other? The dancing reaches a crescendo. Then in the midground horses and black carriage appear: they divide Balduin from the background, driving (quite literally) through the middle of the scene. Scapinelli—old, grey-bearded, slightly stooped, wearing clothes that may once have been smart—descends and sits next to Balduin. The carriage departs. In the background, the students drift away. They are uninterested in the action in the foreground, but Lyduschka lingers. In the rear of the shot, she lurks—curious, concerned, observant,—visually placed between the two figures in the foreground. She sees—as we do—Scapinelli tap Balduin on the arm. Balduin says he is ruined: he wants a lottery ticket or a rich wife. Scapinelli says something: we do not know what. (How perfect is the fact of silence here: the words of a stranger are all the more sinister for being unheard. Despite our proximity, we are in the same position as Lyduschka in that we cannot hear what is being said.) This single shot encapsulates the whole film: the distanced student, the devilish stranger, the ignored lover. And listen to the music. The music does a lot of the work here, building tension as well as atmosphere across the length of this otherwise static scene. It is boisterous for the students and Lyduschka’s dance; it is sinister for Scapinelli; it leaves the consequences of the scene hanging in the air, a few little leaps on the piano and woodwind…

Now to Countess Margit and her fiancé, the Baron von Waldis-Schwarzenberg. It’s another static shot, a studio set this time—or so it appears. But when the servant opens a door in the background we are in the midst of a wood. Pale birch trees occupy the frame of the door. It’s fabulously unexpected, almost dreamlike in its apparition. It’s like one of Klimt’s woodscapes: nothing but pale-limbed birches, surrounded by leafmeal (here, the tinting makes the dim forest floor a shadowy, rich sepia). Figures exit into the woods. We glimpse them through the doorway: they are walking into the dim trees. It’s a beautiful image, made mysterious by the distance the camera keeps between us and them, by the stillness of the frame-within-the-frame. It’s like they’ve wondered off into a painting. (And yes, frames within frames become an important feature in this film…)

Now to the hunt. What gripped me about this sequence? The way it has no stated goal or narrative shape. There are no titles to give it (to give us) a clear sense of direction. Shot: the estate’s gates, the gleaming track, the great pack of dogs at the horses’ feet, dust rises (the piano rumbles and scales up and down). Shot: the lake’s edge, dogs and horses running rear-left to mid-right (the piano is having a field day). Shot: the woods, a path, the horses and pack moving from rear to front, now just at walking pace, but huge clouds of dust rising to engulf the camera (the tempo of the piano line increasing, growing almost wild). Shot: hounds, scampering from rear-right to front-left, pursued by horses. Shot: the same scene, moments later, a kind of jump cut (familiar from the very earliest films, where the “view” is subtly edited to remove some anomaly or section of inaction), the horses riding past. Where are we going? What is the object of the hunt? The music is bustling, bristling: does it know what is about to happen? There is a line in a Hoffmann tale (“The Stranger Child”) where two children are being pursued by sinister spirits in the woods; they follow a path leading home: “but somehow—they didn’t know why—instead of getting out of the wood, they seemed to keep getting farther and farther into it”. That is how I felt about this sequence. Anything might be about to happen. The hunt might go on forever, or end in sudden triumph or catastrophe.

Finally, a clear narrative emerges. Shot: the countess and cousin, on their own. (The piano burnishes the scene with romance, with threat.) The countess will obey familial wishes to marry but does not love her cousin. She rides away. She passes Balduin and Scapinelli. The student runs in her wake, Scapinelli lopes with sinister, comic steps in his wake. We are back at the lake: the countess falls into the water. (The pianist is rushing up and down the keys.) Balduin leaps to the rescue, and the countess slips him an amulet in thanks. (Still the film gives no close-ups, so the title must pre-explain the action for us to comprehend: it adds to the sense of foreshadowing, foretelling.)

Balduin in his study. On the right of frame, a great mirror, against which he practices fencing. Outside we see Lyduschka. (The accordion joins the piano and strings.) She gives Balduin a bouquet of flowers. But Balduin is visiting the countess. The same set with the woods in the background: Balduin is ignored by the Baron and Margit’s father, shoved to the right of the frame. He is made to look and feel out of place. He lingers in the doorway. We see the countess’s interest, the count’s jealousy.

We return to Balduin’s study. The mirror is placed at such an angle that the reflection appears a moment sooner than we might expect: the reflection is further inside the room than Balduin. Just as, now that Scapinelli enters, his reflection lopes further into the room than the man himself. Scapinelli is smiling (the piano issues sinister chords). He spreads endless streams of money across the table. There is cinematic trickery here: hidden joins that supply the miraculous riches. But the best trick of all is yet to come, and it is better hidden. Scapinelli produces a contract: 100,000 gulden in exchange for whatever Scapinelli can take from Balduin’s meagre study. Balduin signs eagerly, not thinking what Scapinelli could take. Scapinelli lingers. They watch each other in the mirror. Scapinelli gestures, looks at the contract. We see the document again. Scapinelli gestures about the mirror, much like Méliès gestured to audiences in his earliest films—emphasizing the impossibility of what he was about to do. After the shot of the text, we return to the scene: Balduin drops the contract, as does his reflection. But then the reflection steps slowly of the frame and into the room. Technically, the shot is absurdly brilliant. First, the left of the lens was masked and the right half of the scene filmed; then, the film strip was rewound and the left half of the scene filmed with the right of the lens masked. (This way round, so that the camera could be unmasked halfway through the scene to record the rest of the scene, when Balduin must cross the frame from left to right to again gesture with bewilderment at the now empty frame of the mirror.) So the same strip of celluloid bears two strips of time, seamlessly joined by the camera operator’s skill—and by the immaculate timing of Wegener’s performance (just imagine the difficulty of getting a piece of paper to drop to the floor twice in the same way). This is where the static camera has such a rewarding role: to provide an apparently stable reality, then to break it. Per Freud’s reading of the uncanny (“unheimlich” in German, literally the “unhomely”), the “unhomely” rests against and may coexist with the “homely”: here, the stable “reality” on screen (static camera, long takes, deep staging) may itself hide a sinister “unreality”. As if in acknowledgement of the trick and its magnificent execution, Scapinelli doffs his hat and bows before leaving the room in the wake of Balduin’s reflection. End of Akt 1.

Akt 2. A ball at the palace of the count. Lyduschka follows. We see her clambering up precipitous exteriors of the palace walls and gardens, up seemingly endless staircases. The interior of the ball is a stage set, but these exteriors are gloriously real: Balduin and the princess walk along moonlit colonnades, beset with shadows (and with a waltz theme that becomes a kind of sinister march). Then the colonnade is shown to overlook the old city, and the lovers’ conversation is observed by Lyduschka. (Her climbing of the exterior walls is almost vampiric: what kind of a person is she? Are her intentions “homely” or “unhomely”?) She sees Balduin write a note to the countess, who has been taken away by the baron. But who is this? Leaning against a column is Balduin’s double, his reflection come to life, his doppelganger. There is a sinister quotation that names the double as a kind of “brother”. (The very appearance of the note is as inexplicable as the double himself: where is this “voice” of the film?)

After the ball, the countess in her salon, before a mirror: another mirror that offers an odd angle for the reflection. It is while inspecting herself in the mirror that she finds Balduin’s note, asking her to meet him in the Jewish cemetery the next night. She then reclines on her chaise longue and seems to happily imagine their meeting. But the scene lingers. Why? Well, look at the framing, which changes subtly over the length of the shot: the camera gently pans to the right, re-emphasizing the mirror in its composition, as well as (beyond it, to the right) the dark space of the balcony door and the night beyond it. Recall also that we’ve seen the countess on that chair before: in the credit sequence, where we were introduced to the character. Visually, her role was foretold and is now fulfilled. Also, the mirror (obviously) refers back to Balduin and his reflection, who will keep disturbing their romance. Finally, the dark space of the night outside foreshadows the two invasions of her salon later in the film: very soon, Lyduschka will climb the walls and steal Balduin’s note; later, Balduin himself will inveigle his way in to plea with the countess in person. Again, much is being suggested by comparatively simple devices. So Lyduschka enters and steals the note, leaving through one frame (the balcony door) while the mirror stands empty in the centre of the frame. End of Akt 2.

At this point there is a “Musical interlude”, the very presence of which is interesting: the film itself acknowledges its score, and the role music plays in shaping the film for its audience. It’s only a brief interlude, but it gives you a moment to reflect and ponder what might happen next…

What happens next is Akt 3. The countess is outside, descending the steps. She passes very close to the camera, which gently tilts and pans to the right to keep her in the frame: it’s the closest we get to a close-up, making her movement seem all the more furtive. In the next shot, she is ambushed by Lyduschka, who then creeps along after her.

In the cemetery, bathed in delicious blue tinting, the countess wanders slowly past the grand monuments to the dead. Lyduschka still lurks. She is like a pale wraith, preying upon the lovers. She hugs the walls, hides in doorways. And here is Scapinelli, who bows to the countess and makes as if to follow her. But we don’t see him again in the scene. Rather, we see Balduin among the Jewish tombstones. He is nervous of who—or what—might appear from the rear of frame, and so are we. That it is the countess who appears is not reassuring: for we are already anticipating another. (The music is romantic, dreamy, but hesitant—something is hovering in the wings.) And then we see it: the other. Balduin’s doppelganger appears from behind a giant tombstone. The lovers are afraid. Though the apparition doesn’t follow them, they run from it. (Again, the technical quality of the shot is superb: the apparition appears in the midst of dimly glowing wild grass and weeds, gently swaying in the breeze. That the masking and matching technique doesn’t show in the more uncontrolled environment of this exterior space is amazing.)

Meanwhile, Lyduschka shows Balduin’s note to the baron—who soon plans to fight a duel with his rival. Just look at Balduin’s newly-furnished apartment. We see the former student surrounded by a mise-en-scène full of telling details: look at the two sets of candelabra, the two silhouette portraits on the wall, the two chairs laid out. While he cannot see his reflection in a hand mirror, we can see the doubling all around him: we can see what he cannot. The duel, too, is a kind of mirrored combat. The count brings news of the baron’s decision to duel and begs Balduin to refuse the fight. The next day Balduin goes to the duel (we assume to turn it down), but en route we are given a title: “His act, which he would not commit, committed by another.” In another beautiful exterior woodland scene, we see the two Balduins pass one another. The real Balduin stumbles away in fright. In the next shot, he sees from a distance what has happened: people are gathered in a meadow, someone is bending over a fallen figure. The timespan of these few shots confused me on first viewing, and on second it does so again. How much time has passed? Didn’t the doppelganger pass by only a moment ago? The tense of the titles suggest that the duel has yet to happen, but Balduin discovers it is already too late: time is weirdly displaced, in this film where the uncanny keeps sneaking up on you. End of Akt 3.

Akt 4 begins with more text, which this time reveals itself to be a quotation from Alfred de Musset. The mysterious “brother”, dressed in black, sits beside the poem’s narrator. Even when footnoted, the content of the text is still unsettling. Who is doing the quoting? Who is reading the text? It’s the filmmakers speaking to us, of course, but because this is a text and because there is no obvious authorial “voice” elsewhere in the film, the quotation is strangely detached from its source. Its deployment makes sense (it comments upon the film’s theme) but the way it is deployed leaves the viewer faintly uneasy. (This needs more thought… for another day.)

Balduin wishes to visit the countess but is refused. In the next scene, he has “surrendered” to drink and frivolity. A dance scene that mirrors the opening scene: Balduin in the foreground at a table with two chairs, while in the background the dancers revel. And here is Lyduschka. But this time she comes over to him, tries to get him to dance, and when he refuses she dances anyway.

Next, an incredible scene: a gambling table. Chiaroscuro lighting. Balduin with endless luck. The faces retreat into the darkness. Only Balduin is left. But the doppelganger appears and sits opposite him. It’s the first time they exchange words: “Dare you also play against me?” They sit, Balduin transfixed, until he finally retreats into the shadows like the others before him.

Balduin sneaks back to the countess’s estate. It is now that he climbs up to her salon. His journey is through real locations: fabulously sinister gateways, overgrown, swathed in blue moonlight; glowing night-time gardens; shadowy paths along dappled walls. The way Balduin carries his cloak makes it look like a second skin, a black shadow, thrown over his arm. In the salon, there is that mirror again: placed at such an angle that it is prominent throughout the scene while revealing no reflection. At the rear of the shot, the open balcony doorway—like the unoccupied mirror frame—suggests an imminent arrival, another “guest” waiting in the shadows. Finally, the countess steps into the mirror—and realizes Balduin casts no reflection. (There is no trick here: the mirror is angled precisely to achieve this effect.) Now the doppelganger appears, not through the doorway but inexplicably next to it: it is Balduin who now flees through the doorway.

Similarly, as he flees the estate it is the doppelganger who can slide through a side gate while Balduin laboriously climbs over the main gates. There follows a brilliant series of shadowy exteriors around an abandoned Prague: Balduin racing along empty lanes, down empty steps, beneath dark arches. The cloak over his arm looks like his shadow, his double. A view across the city, and Balduin still flees—and now back into the birch-lined road through the woods. As with the changing views of the hunt sequence, any clear sense of geography or direction is lost in this section of the film. (Remember Hoffmann: “but somehow—they didn’t know why—instead of getting out of the wood, they seemed to keep getting farther and farther into it”.) We might be blundering about in these mysterious landscapes forever. Frantic, Balduin hails a passing carriage; it is driven by his double. The way the doppelganger turns to greet his passenger is wonderful: as unsettlingly comic and frightening as the similar scene (when Hutter is greeted by his coachman in Transylvania) in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) that it may have inspired. And when Balduin reaches his home, his double is already there, stepping out of the shadows: as in the duel sequence, the doppelganger seemingly precedes his actions. Think back to the way the reflection in Balduin’s study seemed to precede the real Balduin stepping across the room: it’s the same thing, taken to its uncanny conclusion.

Finally, Balduin is in his rich apartment. He takes out a box from a cupboard, and from this a pistol. He is poised—perhaps—to kill himself, but the doppelganger appears again—stepping slyly into frame from the left. (From whence has he stepped? There is no answer.) Balduin takes aim, fires. The apparition is gone. But after a moment of triumph, racing around the empty room, Balduin realizes his reflection is still absent from a mirror. And when he reaches into his pocket, we realize he himself seems to have a bloodstained wound upon his chest. He falls to the floor, dead. And in comes Scapinelli. That loping gait of his, it’s marvellous. He sees the body, gets out the contract and rips it up. He bows to the corpse and stalks merrily out.

There is another quote from Musset. The text takes up the voice of the double, who promises to sit upon his brother’s tomb. And that’s just what we see next. There is the doppelganger, sat upon Balduin’s tomb. The branches of a weeping willow wave in the breeze. There is the raven, and you realize you’ve seen it somewhere before: it was sat on Scapinelli’s shoulder in the credit sequence. That it reappears here now is a brilliant touch, bringing the film to its inevitable conclusion. The visual design of the credits, like the Musset poem, pre-ordain (pre-write) the protagonists. The first image of the film was Wegener as Balduin, his name spelled out on a board; so too, the last image is of Wegener as “Balduin”, accompanied by his name written on a sign.

What a superb film. Atmospheric, mysterious, technically brilliant. I was looking for something Hoffmannesque and I got it: a Hoffmannesque world of Old Europe in the 1820s, complete with Hoffmannesque students pursuing Hoffmannesque romances, shadowed by Hoffmannesque doppelgangers. (Yes yes yes, I know the film is inspired by the work of Poe, Musset, and Goethe, but Hoffmann remains my go-to German Romantic for all things sinister and beguiling.) Whilst I’m talking about authors, I should add that the director of Der Student von Prag is variously credited as being Hanns Heinz Ewers and/or Stellan Rye and/or Paul Wegener. This rather suggests a collaborative effort, principally shaped by Ewes. I must also say that the Edition Filmmuseum DVDs (released by the Filmmuseum München) are exemplary: the set contains two complete versions of the film, one with Josef Weiss’s music in the surviving piano score (with optional audio description) and another with an orchestrated version of Weiss’s music by Bernd Thewes. (I will undoubtedly devote a future post to praising the silent film scores of Bernd Thewes.) It also boasts the shortened English export version of the film, together with a short film made by Ewers in 1913. I hope to watch the 1926 version of Der Student von Prag (with Conrad Veidt) to see how it compares—and (though it falls beyond the remit of this blog) the 1935 version with Anton Walbrook. But the memory of this 1913 version is already lingering in my imagination, and I’m exceedingly glad to have seen it in such a wonderful edition.

Paul Cuff